Regarding the Pain of Others

Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 2003

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Key Figures

Susan Sontag

A widely-published and widely-awarded theorist and critic on a variety of topics, Susan Sontag was a writer, teacher, and filmmaker for over four decades before she wrote her final work, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). It comes more than two decades after her classic treatise, On Photography (1977), a monograph comprised of six essays that she chooses to reconsider in her last opus.

As the author of this nonfiction work on a timely topic (but a universal one, she would argue), Sontag packs her latest book with cases in point, many with detailed explanations, and she writes as if not to inform, but to interrogate. Sontag does trace and explicate war photography through history, examining its precursors in adjacent arts and its relation to journalism, but what makes Regarding the Pain of Others unique is Sontag’s insistence in asking “why” and “how.” Is it really true that perceiving realistic and shocking photographs from the front—any front—will elicit feelings of compassion for the victims and motivate change, or might such images inspire praise and patriotism? Can we take for granted that our postmodern image-saturation numbs the capacity for feeling, and for the thinking needed to re-assess our relations with those in faraway wars? As a character in her own prolonged query, Sontag builds a dialogue—with Virginia Woolf, with herself (her own already iterated theories), and with us.

Sontag proceeds to develop her essay through paradoxes. André Breton’s surrealist aesthetic is not only “elementary realism,” but “good business” (23); photographs provide incontrovertible evidence as recorded by a machine but are as subjective as the photographer and the viewer allow them to be (26); the attacks on the World Trade Center were as “real” as a Hollywood movie for those watching them on TV screens and “like a dream” for those under siege (22); war is an aberration but in fact has always been the norm (74); the more artistic or beautiful a photograph of brutality and disaster is, the more suspicion it raises as a document (77); yet the more “real” it looks, the more we need to question its authenticity or our own taste for the lurid.

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf, famous as a novelist but also as an essayist, dramatist, and social critic, serves as a useful foil for Sontag, herself celebrated as a novelist, essayist, dramatist, and social critic. Because both are drawn to the subject of war photography and what it could or should do, Sontag takes up Woolf’s Three Guineas for purposes of reflection and critique. Woolf’s words describe what she perceives as the horrors of the Spanish Civil War based on photographs. Woolf sees them as evidence for the need to prevent war, pointing out that men see the images differently, regardless of what they say or write, though Woolf then drops this concern.

Sontag challenges Woolf’s mission by showing its limitations in understanding how photography works and how war works. Sontag asks and illustrates what war photography actually does, which has changed a lot since Woolf’s modernist era.

Sontag notes that the literary artist in Virginia Woolf is skeptical of the persuasive capacity of photographs and considers them “not an argument. They are simply a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye” (26). Yet Sontag is quick to point out that Woolf herself sees photographs (in Woolf’s own words) as connecting the eye to the brain, the nervous system, and “every past memory and present feeling” (26).

However, Woolf’s sentiments are from a time when relatively few people had yet seen representations of the horrors of war. Today, such depictions of devastation—packaged, sold, and celebrated, no less—are ubiquitous. Sontag teases, “It would have been inconceivable to Woolf—who did appear on the cover of Time in 1937—that one day her face would become a much-reproduced image on T-shirts, coffee mugs, book bags, refrigerator magnets, mouse pads” (23).

Robert Capa

Another character in the conversation Sontag creates (though he says not a word) is Robert Capa, who, during the Spanish Civil War took a picture of a Republican soldier the moment he was shot by the enemy. The photograph establishes the protocol for 20th-century photojournalism: images must shock. Capa’s iconic photograph took up a full page of Life, the oversized popular news magazine, in 1937, but facing it was also a full-page portrait—of a man in a white dinner jacket and lustrous hair in an ad for Vitalis, a popular men’s grooming product. A small insert there showed a similarly leisure-class man in a white tennis outfit, and the two pages would seem to complement each other in selling the hair tonic.

Sontag writes, “The double spread—with each use of the camera implying the invisibility of the other—seems not just bizarre, but curiously dated now” (33), but in that era, commercial photography was becoming the cornerstone of the popular press, and the shock value of both kinds of photography, war coverage and advertising, grew to seamlessly overlap. Through Capa, Sontag draws out the irreversible need in history for the “reality” of photography to be heightened and enhanced.